European Art and the Wider World 1350-1550
Edited by Kathleen Christian and Leah Clark
Book Information
- Format: eBook
- ISBN: 978-1-5261-2291-9
- Published Date: July 2018
- Series: Art and its Global Histories
Description
European art and the wider world 1350-1550 considers select examples of European art and material culture through the lens of global connections. Through close examination of a wide array of objects such as altarpieces, ceramics and featherwork, it explores European visual culture during the 'age of exploration'. It considers the reception in Europe of objects from Asia, America and Africa and examines works of art as an insight into cultural encounter and conflict in a wide variety of contexts, including Venice, Al-Andalus and Goa. The book is animated by art-historical approaches that have recently transformed the study of the art of this era. It re-casts works that have long featured in a history of a quintessentially Western 'Renaissance' in the light of travel, trade and cultural encounters, and broadens the traditional focus of interest to include material culture.
Reviews
'Bringing together essays synthesizing recent scholarship on Renaissance art and material culture, Christian and Clark (both, Open Univ., UK) have created the first undergraduate-level treatment of the global nature of Renaissance art. The editors' goal is to illuminate "commonalities" between Europe and non-Western, non-Christian cultures. Two of the essays, Christian's on Renaissance altarpieces and Clark's on European collections of non-Western objects, consider indirect influences on art that came from luxury goods traded into Europe. The other two essays-one on art and architecture of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian inhabitants of Spain, and of Amer-Indians of the New World, the other on Venice as a palimpsest of Italian, Byzantine, and Islamic art and culture-are particularly successful in revealing direct connections between different cultures and the hybrid art that developed from close proximity.'
J. B. Gregory, formerly, Delaware College of Art and Design, CHOICE, Vol. 56, No. 2 (October 2018)
'This welcome volume is a textbook, and a very good one. It is first in a series of four titled Art and Its Global Histories that surveys the manifold cross-cultural influences between Western Europe and the world from the Pax Mongolica to postmodernism, supplemented by an anthology of seminal essays and primary sources for the entire period. The full series offers a suite of much-needed pedagogical materials for teaching early modern and modern art history from an inclusive, global-studies perspective [.] Clear and comprehensive, it is written in a serious but lively style, appropriately theoretical without becoming abstruse or jargon ridden. The introduction and essays read like particularly pithy and eloquent class lectures, and the bibliographies following each chapter are worth the price of admission, with thorough and up-to-date coverage that provides a solid starting point for both student and scholarly researchers.'
James M. Saslow, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Winter 2018)
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